This Blog is created to stress the importance of Peace as an environmental directive. “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” – Harry Truman
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Tuesday, October 18, 2016

A brave women came forward in the US Senate to take a position to protect military personnel against sexual assault. That brave Senator was Kristen Gillibrand. She worked hard to hold hearings and take testimony from personnel in the military. There is a problem with sexual assault that has permanent scares on the lives of those assaulted. Over the last three years, (click here) there has been a stream of national headlines and new investigative reports exposing the military’s failure to combat sexual assault in the ranks and/or provide a military justice system that holds assailants accountable in order to maintain good order and discipline. Despite incremental reforms passed in the last two National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA), and a sharp focus on the issue of military sexual assault in Congress, the most recent Pentagon survey found that 62 percent of women who reported being sexually assaulted experienced retaliation. The amount of retaliation remains unchanged from 2012, while the estimated number of unwanted sexual contacts remains at 2010 levels – an average of 52 new cases every day....The name of the legislation was "The Military Justice Improvement Act." Richard Burr voted against protecting military personnel from sexual assault.The cold-hearted Richard Burrrrr.... is no friend to our military personnel. To distract from this reality he sponsored a bill that would label sexual predators in the military, once convicted under the Military Code of Justice, to be listed with NSOR (National Sex Offender Registry). A sexual predator is not the same as rampant sexual assault in our military.

IntroductionMilitary justice attorneys (click here) regularly face the question of whether an accused charged with a
sexual crime under the UCMJ will have to register as a sex offender under federal or state law if
convicted at court-martial. These questions are complicated by the various sexual offense
distinctions under the new UCMJ Article 120, the lack of detail in the DOD reporting
instructions, and the various state laws and interpretations by agencies implementing their
respective state statutes. Neither the federal criminal justice system, nor the military justice
system, govern the registration of sex offenders. The individual states decide and monitor sex
offender registration requirements.
Separate sections in this guide introduce the reader to the Federal, Military, and State laws
applicable to sexual offender registration. An overview of the Federal and DOD authority
precedes a summary of each individual state’s statutory requirements, including citations to the
statutes, covered offenses, registration rules, and duration of the registration requirements.
This guide is designed as a resource for military law practitioners researching these questions in
order to advise their respective clients, colleagues, victims, and convening authorities. It is not
offered as legal advice or a final answer to registration questions and it should not be relied upon
for those purposes. The statutes themselves, interpreted by a qualified attorney, should be the
only resource for individual cases....This is from 2010. It needed updating. The question is "How effective is the new provision in the military courts?"It has nothing to do with sexual assault of our military personnel. They aren't all women.

October 17, 2016...Permian output from West Texas (click here) and eastern New Mexico was set to rise by 30,000 bpd to a record high over 2 million bpd, its third monthly increase in a row, according to EIA data going back to 2007.

Total natural gas production, meanwhile, was forecast to decline for a seventh consecutive month in November to 46.0 billion cubic feet per day (fyi definiton bcfd), the lowest level since July 2015, the EIA said.

That would be down almost 0.2 bcfd from October, making it the smallest monthly decline since July, it noted.

The biggest regional decline was expected to be in the Eagle Ford, down almost 0.2 bcfd from October to 5.6 bcfd in November, the lowest level of output in the basin since November 2013, the EIA said.

Output in the Marcellus formation, the biggest U.S. shale gas field, meanwhile, was expected to rise by almost 0.1 bcfd from October to 18.2 bcfd in November. That would be its first increase since July....

The bankruptcies have some effect on this reduction. I don't mind at all there is a drop in production. The energy market is moving away from fossil fuels as it should. Where the US energy market is not moving away from fossil fuels, it needs to. Alternative energy is the future and we need to invest now.

March 9, 2016

The pace of oil patch bankruptcies is picking up. (click here) According to a new count from Houston law firm Haynes & Boone, April saw 11 bankruptcy filings, the most of any month in the past two years. The headline failures that month were Ultra Petroleum UPL +%, which buckled under $3.9 billion in debt, and Energy XXI, which carried debt of $2.9 billion.

All told, 69 oil and gas producers with $34.3 billion in cumulative secured and unsecured debt have gone under. Since share prices peaked in 2014, the oil bust has wiped out about $1 trillion in equity, with the Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Index off 40%.

There’s more to come. “Despite the modest recovery in energy prices, all indications suggest many more producer bankruptcy filings will occur during 2016,” writes Haynes & Boone. According to Deloitte , about a third of global oil and gas companies, or about 175 of them, are at risk of insolvency. Bernstein Research estimates that by 2019 we’ll see more than $70 billion in defaults amid more than $400 billion in high-yield energy debt — that would indicate that we’re only halfway through the bankruptcies....

It is not at all surprising bonds would be doing better in a financial market scared of it's own shadow when anticipating a recession, but, this is surprising. I hope all this is correct and not manipulated, but, there is reason to at least run an analysis on it.

Net income rose to $2.09 billion, or $4.88 a share, from $1.43 billion, or $2.90, a year earlier, the New York-based company said in a statement Tuesday. That surpassed the $3.88 average estimate of 20 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein has cut jobs, given responsibility to more junior employees and lowered compensation to prepare the firm for when activity rebounded. This quarter shows the benefit of the strategy, which attracted some skepticism among analysts as competitors such as Morgan Stanley decided to retreat instead.

“We saw solid performance across the franchise that helped counter typical seasonal weakness,” Blankfein, 62, said in the statement.

Goldman Sachs’s stock rose 1.6 percent to $171.75 in early trading at 8:15 a.m. in New York. The stock had dropped 6.2 percent this year through Monday, trailing the 3.8 percent advance for the Dow Jones Industrial Average....

October 8, 2016By Tal Kopan...The FBI is denying (click here) that any "quid pro quo" was offered in the fight between the bureau and State Department over the classification level of the email, though one interview described it as such.

"Not only is there no proof. It's absolutely not true, a completely false allegation. It just didn't happen that way," John Kirby, State Department spokesman told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Tuesday. "There was no bargain sought by the FBI. There was no bargain rendered. This was simply an inner agency conversation about the classification over one particular email. So there was no wrongdoing here."

At issue are somewhat contradictory interview notes contained in the crop of newly released FBI documents. In one, an FBI official recounted hearing second-hand that the State Department had offered a "quid pro quo" in exchange for declassifying an email. In another, a different FBI official said he told State Department he'd look into the email, if State Department looked into his request for personnel in Iraq....Who was that person working for the Solicitor General of the State Department? At one point it was known there was politics infused into the State Department by an employee of the Solicitor General of the State Department? That is who is gossiping with a purpose.